Hegel Fragments

1.40-42      G-c.1892-1a,1b


  40. The critical logicians have been much affiliated to the
theological seminaries. About the thinking that goes on in
laboratories they have known nothing. Now the seminarists

  * Sir William Hamilton's Discussions on Philosophy and LiteroSure, ch. 2,
p. 55. What Hamilton objects to is "intimate knowledge of the past" as a
definition of memory.
  ** 40 and 41-2 are from separate unidentified fragments, c. 1892.
|p18

and religionists generally have at all times and places set their
faces against the idea of continuous growth. That disposition
of intellect is the most catholic element of religion. Religious
truth having been once defined is never to be altered in the
most minute particular; and theology being held as queen of
the sciences, the religionists have bitterly fought by fire and
tortures all great advances in the true sciences; and if there be
no true continuous growth in men's ideas where else in the
world should it be looked for? Thence, we find this folk setting
up hard lines of demarcation, or great gulfs, contrary to all
observation, between good men and bad, between the wise and
foolish, between the spirit and the flesh, between all the
different kinds of objects, between one quantity and the next. So
shut up are they in this conception of the world that when the
seminarist Hegel discovered that the universe is everywhere
permeated with continuous growth (for that, and nothing else,
is the " Secret of Hegel ") it was supposed to be an entirely new
idea, a century and a half after the differential calculus had
been in working order.
  41. Hegel, while regarding scientific men with disdain,
has for his chief topic the importance of continuity, which
was the very idea the mathematicians and physicists had been
chiefly engaged in following out for three centuries. This made
Hegel's work less correct and excellent in itself than it might
have been; and at the same time hid its true mode of affinity
with the scientific thought into which the life of the race had
been chiefiy laid up. It was a misfortune for Hegelism, a
misfortune for "philosophy," and a misfortune (in lesser degree)
for science.
  42. My philosophy resuscitates Hegel, though in a strange
costume.